Sunday, August 25, 2013

Barack Obama has said repeatedly that Islam is “a religion of peace.” His administration has accused those who do not agree with this proposition — or who dare mention Islamic violence against women and homicidal oppression of homosexuals — of “Islamophobia.”

These are fictions and the President has done the country a fundamental disservice by promulgating them. The truth? The true religious bigotry is the one that exists in the heart of Islamic orthodoxy. In Saudi Arabia, the existence of Christian churches is prohibited, along with the Bible itself; no Christian or Jew can enter Mecca or Medina lest their mere footsteps desecrate Islam’s holiest sites. In Pakistan and Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world, conversion from Islam to Christianity is punishable by death. In Iraq, Syria, Nigeria and even the President’s beloved Indonesia, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and other “infidels” often face acts of religious genocide by fundamentalists who invoke core Islamic texts and teachings to justify their actions.

In short, as Robert Spencer shows in his alarming new pamphlet, Islam: Religion of Bigots, the creed of Muhammad, far from being a religion of peace, has revealed itself in the post-9/11 world to be a religion of bigotry.

“Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance,” proclaimed President Barack Obama during his appeal to the Muslim world from Cairo on June 4, 2009. “We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition. I saw it firsthand as a child in Indonesia, where devout Christians worshiped freely in an overwhelmingly Muslim country.”1

Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. Even during what is generally considered to have been the Golden Age of Islamic “tolerance,” it is more accurate to say that non-Muslims were tolerated as second-class subjects rather than respected as equals under Islamic regimes. They were regarded as dhimmis, whose residence was conditioned on their submission to humiliating regulations that ensured their subjugation to the Muslim population. They had to pay an onerous special tax (jizya) mandated by the Qur’an (9:29), for example, and wear special marks identifying their second-class status.

Moreover, unlike Christendom, whose leaders have issued apologies for past mistreatment of Jews and condemned the scriptural justifications for that mistreatment, authorities in the Muslim world from Muhammad’s day to this have never thought twice about referring to Jews as “apes and pigs” (cf. Qur’an 2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166), or regarding them as destined by God’s will for destruction. These are some of the salient facts that Obama’s charitable view obscures at a time when prominent Muslim leaders including Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the world’s most prominent Muslim cleric, are calling on the faithful to finish the extermination of the Jews that Hitler began.2

In countries where Muslims are a small minority, such as the United States, there is a surface plausibility to Obama’s claim. Muslim groups have so far accommodated themselves to a democracy whose secular faith is one of diversity and tolerance. But in countries and communities where Muslims constitute a national majority, the face of Islam looks quite different. In Saudi Arabia, the existence of Christian churches is prohibited, along with the possession of Christian Bibles; no Christian or Jew is allowed to enter the cities of Mecca and Medina lest their footprints defile Islam’s sacred sites. As the Kingdom of the Two Holy Places, Saudi Arabia has a unique status in the Islamic world. One aspect of this status is that Mecca and Medina are realizations of Muhammad’s command to remove all but Muslims from the Arabian Peninsula.3 Mecca and Medina represent the aspirations of the Muslim world, the vision of a quintessential Islamic society: one in which there are no non-Muslims.

In Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere, conversion from Islam to Christianity is already punishable by death, in accord with Muhammad’s command. In Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Nigeria, and even Obama’s beloved Indonesia, religious minorities — Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and non-believers –face harassment and often violent religious persecution. These persecutions are carried out by jihadist Muslims who invoke core Islamic texts and teachings to justify their actions. In short, in the Muslim world itself, which since 9/11 has been increasingly swept up in the tide of Islamic supremacism, the creed of Muhammad reveals itself to be a religion of bigots rather than, as President Obama would have it, a religion of peace.

There is a theological foundation for Islamic bigotry. The Qur’an calls the Jews and Christians who reject Muhammad “the most vile of created beings” (98:6). It says that the “polytheists are unclean” (9:28), and since it claims that Jews consider Ezra the Son of God the way Christians consider Jesus the Son of God (9:30), and that “it is not befitting for Allah to take a son” (19:35), in Islamic theology, Jews and Christians are as much polytheists as are Hindus and hence just as unclean.

Religious Genocide

In March 2013, the Egyptian Islamic scholar Abdullah Badr demonstrated how such a belief can work out in practice when he explained that Christians disgusted him, saying that it was “not a matter of piety, but disgust. I get grossed out. Get that? Disgust, I get grossed out, man, I cannot stand their smell or … I don’t like them, it’s my choice. And they gross me out; their smell, their look, everything. I feel disgusted, disgusted.”4

That disgust has combined with imperatives derived from Qur’anic injunctions to “slay the polytheists wherever you find them” (9:5) and to subjugate the People of the Book (9:29) to play out in Islamic history in the cleansing of entire regions of their non-Muslim populations. Eliminating other religions, as per Qur’an 8:39 (“fight…until religion is all for Allah”) and making sure that any non-Muslims who remain are conquered and submissive, is the overarching goal of jihad. As an Iranian Bahai observed to V. S. Naipaul in the course of his travels through the world of Islam, “These Muslims are a strange people. They have an old mentality. Very old mentality. They are very bad to minorities.”5

The transformation of Constantinople following its conquest in 1453 illustrates the effects of Muslim bigotry. Before the Muslim conquest, Constantinople had been the center of Eastern Christianity and the second city of all Christendom, as well as the chief rival to the splendor and authority of Rome. Its Hagia Sophia cathedral, built by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, was the grandest and most celebrated church in the Christian world until the construction of St. Peter’s in the Vatican. As recently as 1914, Constantinople still boasted a population nearly fifty percent Christian. Today, as a result of the religious persecution of Christians, the city is now 99.99% Muslim.6

After the 1453 Muslim conquest, the Hagia Sophia Cathedral, like so many other Christian churches before and after, was transformed into a mosque. After Turkey’s secularization, the mosque was converted into a museum by the secularists, and is now about to be transformed into a mosque again. While secular Turkey did not enforce Islamic law, it saw a depoliticized Islam as essential to the Turkish identity at the expense of the Christian population. In Tur-Abdin in southwest Turkey in 1960, there were 150,000 Christians; today, there are just over two thousand.7 The rest have fled in the face of Muslim hostility and harassment.

Occasionally, Muslim authorities found it politically expedient to draw explicitly on the genocidal passions Muhammad had inspired, and used them to arouse the fury of the populace against the dhimmis, who were bringing Allah’s disfavor upon the larger community. In a harbinger of the Armenian catastrophe that would take place in Turkey twenty years later, the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid initiated a series of bloody strikes against the restive Christian Armenians in eastern Anatolia in 1895. The Armenians had made the mistake of embracing Western notions of human rights, and of beginning to question their dhimmi status. According to Lord Kinross, historian of the Ottoman Empire, “at the point of a bayonet,” the Armenians were offered “the choice between death and forcible conversion to Islam.”8 The genocide that the Muslim Turks subsequently conducted during World War I was a manifestation of the same jihadist strain in Islam, and led to the murder of a million and a half Armenians.

In Turkey itself, the Christian population has declined from 15% in 1920 to 1% today. In Syria, the Christian population has declined from 33% to 10% in the same span. Since the Turks occupied northern Cyprus in 1974, churches have been despoiled of their icons, which have flooded the market in Greece. The Turks have taken over many churches for secular uses, and even tried to convert the fourth century Christian monastery of San Makar into a hotel. Christian Cypriots are forbidden to come near the building, much less enter it.9

Likewise in Tunisia, “in the early 1950s, half of the inhabitants of Tunis were Catholics, but with the declaration of independence some 280,000 Tunisian Catholics were expelled. Today there are no more than a tenth of this number and most of the churches are closed or no longer in use.”10

Before the Gulf War, the number of Christians in Iraq approached a million people, according to some estimates.11 But with Shi’ites and Sunnis vying for power in the war-torn country, over half, or roughly 500,000 Christians, have fled the country rather than risk the treatment in store for them from the majority Muslim population. This is not to suggest that the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein was particularly hospitable to Iraqi Christians. Even under his relatively secular regime, in which Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz was a Chaldean Catholic, the small Christian community faced random violence from the Muslim majority. Aside from outbreaks of actual persecution, including murder, Christians were routinely pressured to renounce their religion and to marry Muslims.12 But since Saddam’s removal and the institution of Iraq’s Islamic constitution, the situation has grown exponentially worse.

Since the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascendancy in Egypt, enabled by the Obama administration, Islamic bigotry has been directed with increasing violence toward the nation’s indigenous Coptic Christian population. Recently, Muslim mobs, with the acquiescence of the Islamic supremacist regime, conducted an armed attack on St. Mark’s Cathedral, the seat of the Coptic pope. Now Copts are fleeing the country in droves. NBC News reported in June 2013: “The number of Egyptians receiving asylum in the U.S. has jumped more than five-fold in recent years.”13

In Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ, the population was 85% Christian in 1948, but as of 2006, only 12% of those who hold to the faith of the town’s most celebrated native son remained, and even that minimal percentage is almost certainly smaller today.14

Islamic bigotry is driving Christians out of their ancient homelands all over the Middle East. “A century ago,” noted Simon Kent in the Toronto Sun, June 2013, “more than 20% of the region’s population was Christian and as recently as the 1980s, places like Lebanon had a Christian majority. Now, with Christian numbers fading, it’s split between brawling Hezbollah Shi’a and Sunni fanatics. Estimates put the Christian population in the Middle East at under 5% and sinking rapidly — and the figure only remains that high because of the Coptic Christians who have not yet left strife- torn Egypt.”15

The purging of Christians in the Middle East has taken place largely since Osama bin Laden launched the Islamic jihad in earnest. It represents the greatest population cleansing of modern times, dwarfing “ethnic” cleansings, and has taken place almost silently — while facile Western observers, including the occupant of the White House, rhapsodize about Muslim “tolerance.”

In a stark plaint that would sound paranoid if it were not so obviously true, Gregory III, the Patriarch of Antioch of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, stated in 2006: “After September 11, there is a plot to eliminate all the Christian minorities from the Arabic world. Our simple existence ruins the equations whereby Arabs can’t be other than Moslems, and Christians but be westerners.”16

Nor is it just the Arab Middle East where the purge is taking place. Hindu activist Bharati Krishna declares: “When Pakistan came into existence in 1947, 24 per cent of the population were Hindus. And now look at the percentage of Hindus in Pakistan, just below 2 per cent. What happened to the rest? Majority of them have been mercilessly killed by the Islamic fanatics and the rest forcibly converted to Islam.” Krishna adds “the same happened in the case of Bangladeshi Hindus. The percentage of Hindu population in Bangladesh in 1947 (then East Pakistan) was numbered at 31. But with course of time it has been declined and stationed at nine per cent now. Massive religious conversion and ruthless murders of the Hindus were the reasons for this decline.”17

Traditional Islamic Submissions

Bigotry towards non-Muslim populations, along with religious cleansing, is as old as Islam itself. Islam originated in Arabia in the late seventh and early eighth centuries.18Before its advent, Egypt, Libya, and all of North Africa were Christian, and had been so for hundreds of years. So were Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Asia Minor. The churches addressed in the letters of Paul, collected in the New Testament, are located in Asia Minor and modern Turkey as well as modern Greece. Antioch, Constantinople (“Istanbul” in modern Turkey) and Alexandria in Egypt were three of the most important Christian centers of the first millennium. But then came the Arab armies, and ultimately these lands became Muslim — not because the compelling aspects of Islam induced large numbers of people to convert to the religion of the conquerors, but because the non-Muslims were forced to accept a humiliating second-class status. This was a bigotry enforced by the sword. Conversion to Islam became the only way to live a decent life or, in many cases, to live at all, and in this way the Christian populations of these areas steadily diminished.

There was no tolerance for the “other,” as numerous misleading commentators claim. For the invading Muslim armies, it wasn’t enough to conquer their rivals; the native population had to be subdued, and its religion humiliated. Historian Bat Ye’or recounts that when the Arab invaders conquered Egypt in the seventh century, “Sophronius [Bishop of Jerusalem], in his sermon on the Day of Epiphany 636, bewailed the destruction of churches and monasteries, the sacked towns, the fields laid waste, the villages burned down by the nomads who were overrunning the country. In a letter the same year to Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople, he mentions the ravages wrought by the Muslim Arabs. Thousands of people perished in 639, victims of the famine and plague that resulted from these destructions.”19

Once the Muslims were entrenched in power, they began to levy the jizya, or tax on non-Muslims, which were not small charges. A medieval chronicler writes of one of the towns subjected to Muslim rule: “It is impossible to describe the lamentable position of the inhabitants of this town, who came to the point of offering their children in exchange for the enormous sums that they had to pay each month, finding no one to help them because God had abandoned them and had delivered the Christians into the hands of their enemies.”20 In the fourteenth century, the pioneering sociologist Ibn Khaldun explained the options for Christians: “It is [for them to choose between] conversion to Islam, payment of the poll tax, or death.”21

As far as Islamic law was concerned, the Muslims who displayed such ruthless bigotry toward non-Muslims were not carrying their zeal too far, but were following the example of their Prophet, who expelled the three Jewish tribes of Medina: “It has been narrated on the authority of Ibn Umar that the Jews of Banu Nadir and Banu Quraiza fought against the Messenger of Allah, who expelled Banu Nadir, and allowed Quraiza to stay on, and granted favour to them until they too fought against him. Then he killed their men, and distributed their women, children and properties among the Muslims, except that some of them had joined the Messenger of Allah who granted them security. They embraced Islam. The Messenger of Allah turned out all the Jews of Medina, Banu Qainuqa… and the Jews of Banu Haritha and every other Jew who was in Medina.”22

In light of the violence with which Muhammad spread Islam, there is a distinct menace in his famous invitation to the Byzantine emperor Heraclius: “Embrace Islam and you will be safe.”23 Heraclius didn’t embrace Islam, and ultimately Byzantium fell to the jihadi sword.

These statements and actions of Islam’s prophet laid the foundations of a culture of bigotry and religious purges. The former realms of Christendom, now universally regarded as part of the Islamic world, only became so in the same way as these Arabian Jewish tribes became Muslim: by being bathed in blood and then subjugated by force.

The provisions governing the jizya and the subjection of non-Muslims in Islamic law have not been fully enforced since the mid-nineteenth century, but reinstituting them is a goal of today’s jihadists, who seek to restore the orthodoxy of the faith and are now in control of the two largest countries in the Middle East. In March 2007, Muslim gangs knocked on doors in Christian neighborhoods in Baghdad, demanding payment of the jizya.24 In December 2011, Yassir Al-Burhami, a leader of the Salafists, an Egyptian movement of rigorist Muslims, reiterated some of the classic Islamic laws regarding the dhimmis: “Appointing infidels to positions of authority over Muslims is prohibited. Allah said: ‘Never will Allah grant the infidels a way [to triumph] over the Believers’” (Qur’an 4:141). He also declared that the Muslims of Egypt should begin again to collect thejizya from the Christians.

Al-Burhami also cited Muhammad’s precedents as a guide to Muslims living in countries in which they were still minorities: “The Muslims can implement any form of conduct used by the Prophet Muhammad. When the Prophet Muhammad was still in Mecca, he dealt with the infidels in a certain way, and when the Muslims are weak, they should deal with the infidels this way. ‘Refrain from action, pray, and pay the zakkat.’ In many infidel countries, such as occupied Palestine, we instruct Muslims to do just that. We are not telling the Muslims in Gaza to launch rockets every day, which would lead to the destruction of the entire country. We tell them to adhere to the truce. When the Prophet Muhammad first arrived in Al-Medina, he signed a treaty with the Jews without forcing them to pay the jizya poll tax. This was necessary at the time, but when they breached the treaty, he fought them, and eventually, he imposed the jizya upon the People of the Book…. The Christians [of Egypt] can be dealt with like the Jews of Al-Medina. This is possible.”25

The idea that Christians must “feel themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29) in Islamic lands is also very much alive. When the first Catholic Church in Qatar opened in March 2008, it included no cross, no bell, no steeple, and no sign. “The idea,” explained the church’s pastor, Father Tom Veneracion, “is to be discreet because we don’t want to inflame any sensitivities.”26 In the Philippines, the church in the nation’s one Islamic city, Marawi, has also done away with the cross. A Catholic priest, Father Teresito Soganub, explains: “To avoid arguments and to avoid further misunderstandings we just plant the cross deep in our hearts.” Soganub, according to Reuters, “doesn’t wear a crucifix or a clerical collar and sports a beard out of respect for his Muslim neighbors.” He celebrates few weddings, since roast pork is a staple of wedding receptions for Filipino Catholics.27

It is easy to see the need for such discretion. Preaching in a mosque in Al-Damam, Saudi Arabia, the popular Saudi Sheikh Muhammad Saleh Al-Munajjid recommended hatred of Christians and Jews as a proper course: “Muslims must,” he declared, “educate their children to jihad. This is the greatest benefit of the situation: educating the children to jihad and to hatred of the Jews, the Christians, and the infidels; educating the children to jihad and to revival of the embers of jihad in their souls. This is what is needed now.”28

The hatred of other religions, particularly of Christianity and Judaism, is manifest in the attitude towards religious conversion in countries with Islamic supremacist regimes. Converts from Islam to Christianity are often hunted in these countries, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia being the most prominent, while virtually all religious authorities in the Muslim world agree that such individuals deserve death. Muhammad himself commanded it: “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.”29 This is still the position of all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence, although there is some disagreement over whether the law applies only to men, or to women also.

At Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, the most prestigious and influential institution in the Islamic world, an Islamic manual that the institution certifies as a reliable guide to Sunni Muslim orthodoxy states: “When a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed.” Although the right to kill an apostate is reserved in Islamic law to the leader of the community and other Muslims can theoretically be punished for taking this duty upon themselves, in practice a Muslim who kills an apostate needs to pay no indemnity and perform no expiatory acts (as he must in other kinds of murder cases under classic Islamic law). This accommodation is made because killing an apostate “is killing someone who deserves to die.”30

Islamic Bigotry and Islamophobia

Given Islam’s long and shameful record of bigotry, it is perverse in the extreme that Islamic spokesmen routinely charge those who point out the foregoing facts about Islam with … bigotry. According to these spokesmen and their gullible sympathizers on the left, any observation about the harsher realities of the Islamic world is evidence of “Islamophobia” — irrational hatred of all Muslims, and not just those who are carrying out terrorism in the name of Allah, or brutalizing women as a religious obligation. Several widely publicized reports, including one by the Democratic Party- aligned Center for American Progress, single out prominent conservative figures who have publicly criticized the misogyny, bigotry and terrorism promoted by many Islamic institutions, and stigmatized them as “Islamophobes.”31

The term Islamophobia is one of the favored weapons of the Muslim Brotherhood and allied jihadist organizations in the West. Muslim Brotherhood groups such as the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) employ it to manufacture a modern-day thought crime out of legitimate concerns about Islamic bigotry, misogyny and support for terrorist entities like Hezbollah and Hamas. Voltaire said, “To learn who rules over you [or in this case intends to rule over you], simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”

The campaign to suppress all links of Islam to Islamic terrorism gained its greatest and most potentially damaging success in 2011, when Muslim Brotherhood groups and their left-wing allies prevailed on the Obama Administration to remove all mention of Islam and jihad from the counter-terror training materials used by the FBI and other agencies. This left agents in a state of woeful unpreparedness, rendering them incapable of evaluating intelligence regarding jihadist threats. This condition of purposeful ignorance bore bitter fruit in April 2013, when Islamic terrorists exploded a bomb at the Boston Marathon. The Russian and Saudi governments had warned the FBI in advance about the bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev. But the FBI discounted the warnings because they were blind to Tsarnaev’s connection to the global Islamic jihad and perceived him only as a Chechen “nationalist,” engaged in a cause that was a Russian problem and had nothing to do with the United States.

The goal of the “Islamophobia” campaign is disarm the West in the face of the Islamic threat, and beyond that to establish in free societies the blasphemy provisions of Islamic law forbidding criticism of Islam. This prohibition would preclude, for example, recognition of the Jew-hatred that permeates Islamic sacred texts, as well as the pronouncements of Islamic leaders.32 It would also render the First Amendment to the U.S. Bill of Rights null and void. Adoption of laws criminalizing “Islamophobia” would also foreclose criticism of Islam’s institutionalized mistreatment of women and gays.

If such a possibility seems farfetched, consider that the student councils at four elite universities in California, including UCLA and UC Berkeley, have passed (by unanimous votes) “anti-Islamophobia” resolutions mandating “zero tolerance” for just those expressions of opinion. One of the chief advocates of these resolutions, and leader of two campus Muslim Brotherhood fronts, Sadia Saifuddin, was recently nominated by the regents of the UC system to sit on their board as the representative of all UC students.33

Blasphemy laws protecting Islam may not yet be adopted in the West, but Muslim mobs are ready to enforce them anyway. In the fall of 2005, violent Muslim riots resulting in over 100 deaths were triggered by the publication of cartoons in Denmark depicting Muhammad. In the wake of these Islam-inspired outrages, a group of writers issued a manifesto called, “Together Facing the New Totalitarianism.”34 This genuine anti-bigotry manifesto declared: “After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global totalitarian threat: Islamism…. We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of ‘Islamophobia,’ a wretched concept that confuses criticism of Islam as a religion and stigmatization of those who believe in it. We defend the universality of the freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit can exist in every continent, towards each and every maltreatment and dogma.”35

Canaries in the Mine of the Islamic Jihad

The foremost targets of Muslim bigotry and the canaries in the mine for all non-Muslims in the path of the jihad are, unsurprisingly, Jews and the state of Israel. Islamic leaders have repeatedly affirmed their desire that the Jewish State cease to exist — a genocidal agenda in itself, and one that could only be accomplished by a Holocaust in the Middle East. Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the former president of Iran, has called for such a Holocaust (without notable dissent from the Muslim world), saying that “the annihilation of the Zionist regime will come,” and that it was predicted by the Ayatollah Khomeini: “The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” — a declaration widely but not quite accurately translated in the West as “as the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map.”

On other occasions, Ahmadinejad has made the goal crystal clear: “The Islamic umma (community) will not allow its historic enemy [Israel] to live in its heartland,” and “the issue of Palestine is not one which we could compromise on …. This would mean the defeat of the Islamic world.” In Ahmadinejad’s mind, the destruction of Israel is near:

“There is no doubt that the new wave [of attacks] in Palestine will soon wipe this disgraceful blot [Israel] from the face of the Islamic world.” The Palestinians have made this genocidal goal equally clear. In the words of Mahmoud al-Zahar, a founder of Hamas: “There is no place for you Jews among us, and you have no future among the nations of the world. You are headed to annihilation.”36

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah (Party of Allah), has proclaimed the same goal:“[I]f they [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide,” while a 1992 Hezbollah statement declared “open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on earth.”37

This hatred of the Jews and their existence emanates directly from Muhammad’s call to all Muslims to “fight the Jews and kill them” to the very last one. Thus Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood that the Obama administration has chaperoned to power in Egypt, proclaimed: “Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them — even though they exaggerated this issue — he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers….”38

For the jihadists, the Jews are only the first in line. In 1998, the World Islamic Front, led by Osama bin Laden, formally declared jihad against “the Jews and the Crusaders,” meaning the Christian nations (as the jihadis regarded them) of America and Europe. The fatwa declared: “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”39

At the “World Without Zionism” conference held in Tehran in October 2005, the assembled delegates chanted “death to Israel, death to America, death to England,” while the host, Ahmadinejad, predicted to the cheers of the assembled that, “with the help of the Almighty, we shall soon experience a world without America and Zionism, notwithstanding those who doubt.”40

Like Ahmadinejad, Hasan Nasrallah also wants to see America destroyed: “Let the entire world hear me. Our hostility to the Great Satan [America] is absolute. … Regardless of how the world has changed after 11 September, ‘Death to America’ will remain our reverberating and powerful slogan: ‘Death to America.’”

This chilling command is the logical extension of Islamic bigotry, and its crowning manifestation.

Thursday, August 22, 2013

The mood in the Middle East is rapidly changing. The elation of the Arab Spring, which led to prosperity and an economic and social upturn in the lives of millions of Arabs, has now deteriorated into a sense that significant dangers are stalking the Arab-Muslim world.

Arabic TV, especially Al-Jazeera, has been broadcasting programs asking if bloodshed is the only mission of Islam, and if jihad [war in the service of Islam] still motivates believers to invade other countries with abandon and indulge in worldwide slaughter.

Given the current situation, the Middle East is obsessed with asking itself: Who is responsible for the Muslims' catastrophe? And what keeps us chained behind, while the rest of the world forges ahead in social, economic and technological progress? Needless to say, the imams do not blame themselves. They claim that to change the situation we need only more and closer study and practice of the Islamic faith.

As always, our Islamic society, constantly at odds with itself, blames everyone for our misfortunes. In the days of the Prophet (S.A.A.S.), we blamed the Jews of Khaybar in the Arabian Peninsula for our ills. Now the imams who head the militant Islamist organizations tell us that the Jews, a tiny people who pose no threat to the might of Islam, are responsible for all our ills and for all our failures.

Islamic radicals, however, hate not only the Jews but also the Christians, who have become, we are told, our sworn enemies. Christianity, like Judaism, is also vilified. The history of our hatred for the Christians began with the Crusades, and over the years the same hated Crusaders became the hated European imperialists and the hated colonialists.

The hatred for the Christian West is founded on a sense of deprivation, of humiliation and inferiority, of being threatened and exploited, all of which cast doubt on the eternal message of Islam as the only up-to-date religion, destined to rule the world and invalidate the other religions. The Islamic sages who interpret the will of Allah say that both Christianity as well as Judaism, while monotheistic, are anachronistic, and while temporarily they can exist -- with the patronage of, and overshadowed by, Islam -- eventually all Christians and Jews will convert to Islam.

Islam's openly-stated desire to control the world is now light-years away from its current wretched plight. The Muslims' low self-image not only makes us self-destructive, but leads to the desire to destroy anyone who succeeds, even if it means destroying ourselves as well. The unique prosperity and power of the Jews in Palestine, compared with the slaughter, poverty and backwardness of their Arab neighbors, create antagonism, jealousy, rage and an increasingly murderous desire for "revenge" among Muslims still under the heady influence of the Arab Spring and incited by the sheikhs of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The imams in the mosques brainwash the masses, claiming that Islam's real enemies are the Christians, "the Crusaders," manipulated by the Jews who control them. Attempting to fool the leaders of the Christian West and weaken Israel, the Islamists sugarcoat the real situation and tell the Christians that all they have to do is solve the Palestinian problem. Once that has happened, the artificial Jewish existence in Palestine will come to an end, the entire Middle East will metamorphose into paradise and blossom, and everyone will live in harmony forever. Unfortunately, many Europeans have swallowed this tale whole. In the meantime, however, when not speaking to the West and telling each other the truth, the Islamists repeat the ancient adage, "We will begin on Saturday and finish on Sunday," that is, first we will get rid of the Jews and then we will get rid of the Christians -- as we are seeing now in Nigeria, Iraq and especially Egypt.

When it comes to theology, Islamist theologians claim the Jews distorted the Torah to conceal the future mission of Muhammad, and those same theologians have nothing but contempt for the Christian belief in the Divine Birth. In the meantime, because of regional Middle East chaos, the radical leaders of political Islam hide their true attitude towards Christianity and do not trumpet their plan to take over the world and rule it as Allah's chosen people; instead, they recruit eager agents among the Christians to make life miserable for the Jews.

The radical sheikhs still mourn the loss of "Andalusia" -- that is, Spain -- as well as Palestine and other parts of the old Islamic empire that were lost, and now plan not only to restore Islamic rule to the lost territories but globally. Thus Islamic terrorists, inspired and goaded on by the preaching of their leaders, blow up planes, embassies, towers, subways and skyscrapers to cause untold casualties. Dispatched by their imams, they go on rampages of slaughter and bloodshed in the name of Allah, and brainwash and recruit Islamic youths as their successors to ensure future terrorism and violence.

Much of the Islamist sheikhs' activity focuses on brainwashing within the Islamic communities in the West, where many have found a haven. There, they have formed enclaves where they nurture terrorism and violence, and,when the time comes, from where they will break out of their ghettos to overwhelm their tolerant hosts who generously and freely accepted them into Western Europe and America.

The leaders of the Western world stubbornly claim, as the European Union did of Hezbollah, that there is a difference between religious and political Islamic leaders but these well-meaning Westerners will pay dearly for making the distinction. The West's political correctness and refusal to listen to and believe what the political Islamist leadership openly says -- and its refusal to defend itself -- will lead to catastrophe. For us Arabs it is not just wordplay: when someone tells you he means to kill you, he means to kill you.

Innocence, willful ignorance and complete lack of understanding of both the Arab and Muslim mentality and its operational codes have misled the West into either patronizing Islamism and stupidly trying to dictate to its leaders, or into simply fearing it. Every single American attempt to bring Western-like democracy to the Arab-Muslim world has failed abysmally and led only to radical Islamist regimes as, for example, in Iran and Egypt. The same is true for the European declarations against the "undemocratic" involvement of the army in the government in Turkey. These brought on the Islamist regime of Erdogan, who jailed the Turkish army's senior officers, who had maintained the balance achieved by Ataturk in restraining radical Islam. The flight of the Americans from Yemen following intelligence warnings regarding al-Zawahiri and Al-Qaeda brought Al-Qaeda greater success than any genuine terrorist attack could have done.

While the legacy of Islam and its Prophet are hardwired into the consciousness of every da'wah [religious outrach] activist, and dictate that all means -- terrorism, violence, deceit -- are justified to overcome the enemy, the Americans still seem to have incomprehensible trouble believing that radical Islam means exactly what it says. American impotence in the face of Iranian intransigence and renewed Russian power, as well as the lack of support for the Sisi government in Egypt, will lead to a regional disaster.

America must give up its dreams of a democratic happy ending for the Middle East and start looking reality in the face. Once and for all, Americans need to internalize a fact: Western interests are in danger of being attacked and destroyed by both foreign and domestic enemies. The calls for America to ignore and distance itself from the events in the Middle East will eventually pave the way for a violent, full blown, powerful invasion of both Europe and the United States. If political Islam is not stopped now in the Middle East, it will, when the tipping point has been reached, explode in the West.

It is no longer possible, when faced with the challenges of radical Islam, to pursue a policy of weakness or to support democratic processes which correspond only to American values.

The Islamists have now started on Sunday: the Christians are in their crosshairs, and when they have finished, the Islamists will return to Saturday and destroy the Jews. The Zionists in Israel understand the threats of radical Islam and its intentions for their country far better than the U.S. administration will ever be able to. The Jews do not fear to show their determination and willingness to fight a life-and-death battle for their continued existence; it is that determination which has made the Islamists avoid confronting them for the present and target the Christians instead.

What is unreal are the dictates America imposes on Israel, including the demand to release convicted murderers from jail and to reach an agreement with Mahmoud Abbas, who does not have the support of the Palestinian people. This approach will lead to a Hamas takeover of the West Bank and most likely then of Jordan; and it will destroy what is left of the Christian community in Bethlehem and east Jerusalem, whose members after the Oslo Accords and the withdrawal of Israel from the territories, were killed, raped and threatened into fleeing their homes.

The Christians in the Middle East are in danger of annihilation. If the Islamic fanatics collaborating with the so-called "Free Syrian Army" overthrow Assad, the Christians, who are part of the minority coalition in the Syrian regime, will be subjected to an unimaginable slaughter that in all probability will spread to Lebanon. Thus in trying to stabilize the region, the West should reconsider its policies in dealing with Russia when it comes to Syria and nuclear Iran with its proxy Hezbollah.

A tougher line also needs to be taken with Egypt. If the Muslim Brotherhood succeeds in overthrowing the provisional government of President Mansour and General Sisi, there will be a bloodbath not only of Western values but of the Copts -- the original inhabitants of Egypt now being brutalized out of their historic home. Christians, who openly supported the recent events that ousted the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi, had their churches burned and believers killed by Muslims even years before the most recent events. Now, museums and a tenth of the churches in Egypt have been burned. Morsi's followers do not forget that the Copts aligned themselves with the new government and against Morsi, and have recently begun beheading Coptic businessmen in the Sinai Peninsula, which was a tourist attraction when under the control of Israel. It is now a center for attacking the Copts, robbing them of their property and forcing them to flee. However, if Friday is dealt with properly, a more optimistic sun will rise over Saturday and Sunday.

Flogging is the punishment for fornication in Islam, whether the woman had casual sex by choice outside of marriage or was raped. Without four male witnesses or the confession of the attacker, no rape case can be proven, according to Shariah law. So if the victim is “brazen” enough to report the crime, she is thus admitting to having sex, which in itself is a crime if the sex was not with her husband. And in normal circumstances, a rapist would not attack in front of any witnesses, unless they were also a part of the attack. Facing such dire punishments, it is highly probable that most Muslim women would not dare report these attacks, even if they need medical attention.

With such laws, it’s no surprise that rapes have become a part of Muslim culture. During the “Arab Spring” in Egypt, hundreds of women were raped in Tahrir Square by those Egyptians who were glorified in the West as “fighters against the cruel dictatorship of Mubarak” and who then voted for the Islamist Muhammad Mursi and made him the President of Egypt. Then, just 13 months later, those same Egyptians again crowded into Tahrir Square and enthusiastically supported the military coup against Mursi “for democracy”– and in just four days raped 130 more women on the way to that democracy.

In Darfur, rapes had become the true Weapon of War, and the number of raped women and girls was in the thousands. The same happened in Bangladesh. Author Ibn Warraq’s book, Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out, provides the testimony of Muhammad ben Abdullah whose reflections on the massacres committed in Bangladesh in 1971 give a glimpse into this Muslim world of rape. Both Ibn Warraq and Ben Abdullah are pseudonyms because speaking out against Islam, especially from an apostate, can be deadly. Ben Abdullah renounced Islam and became an apostate after seeing the crimes committed by Muslims in Bangladesh.

He writes: “I saw a well-equipped invading army indiscriminately killing millions of civilians and raping 200,000 women. Eight million uprooted people walked barefoot to take refuge in a neighboring country. The institution of Islamic leadership supported the invading army actively in capturing and killing freedom fighters and non-Muslims and raping women on a massive scale. Each of 4,000 mosques became the ideological powerhouses of the mass-killers and mass-rapists. And these killers and rapists, these Islamists, were the same people of the same land as the freedom fighters and raped women. That was the civilians of Bangladesh and the killer army of Pakistan in 1971. All the Muslim countries and communities of the world either stood idle or actively sided with the killers and rapists in the name of Islam. The message was clear. Something was very wrong, either with all the Islamic leaders or with Islam itself.” (page 294)

In Syria, women were raped by both governmental troops and by “fighters for democracy” from Al Qaeda and other Islamist groups.

The truth is that raping the enemy’s women has become a part of Muslim warfare since Muhammad started his conquests.

Waqidi was a devout Muslim who sincerely admired the prophet Muhammad. But he was also a historian and one of the best experts on early Islam. In his book KitabAl Maghazi, he describes the following episode:

Bani Mustaliq was a branch of the tribe of Khuza’ah who were the neighbors of Quraysh, the tribe of the prophet Muhammad. They were a free Arab tribe, not Jews or Christians. In the sixth year of the migration, Muhammad, under the invented pretext that Bani Mustaliq wanted to besiege Medina, took his gang of the Muhajirs (emigrants from Mecca who followed Muhammad to Medina; also called “Companions”) and the Ansar (those of the people of Medina who joined Muhammad and became Muslims), and attacked Bani Mustaliq by the Well of Marysi’. As a result of the “bloody battle,” ten men of Bani Mustaliq and one of the Companions were killed, gaining Muhammad a triumphant victory over the “idolatries.” Consequently, a large booty fell to the hands of the army of Islam, and the women of the enemy were an important part of that booty.You may have supposed that Muhammad, described by Muslim scholars as ”the most merciful of all men,” immediately ordered his army to show mercy on them, but the truth is that he did not.

The troops composed of the first Muslim “saints” and “martyrs,” and commanded by Muhammad in person, started to rape 200 women whose husbands were not dead, and were in fact only a few feet from the site of the rapes. I repeat: 200 captured women of the tribe (expressly said to be free women and not slaves, “kara’im al ‘Arab”, Halabi ii 296) were raped by Muhammad’s men with his full consent! And what did “the most perfect of all men” do? He recommended to his men the means to prevent conception! To make the situation even more cynical, the Muslims, when they got bored of Bani Mustaliq women, made the husbands buy back their raped wives.

That was really a great idea! Such a wonderful method of raising funds for the “Sacred War” could come only to Muhammad’s clever head! First attack the free Arab tribe, then rape their women, then make the husbands pay ransom for letting their raped wives free, and on this money, organize the bandit raid on another Arab or Jewish tribe where the cycle will continue.

Now I understand how Islam spread so fast in Arabia!

But perhaps this was just an isolated incident? No. On at least two other occasions, Khaybar and Hunain, Mohammed had to regulate what might be done with women taken on the field. It was at Hunain that he definitely enacted, against the scruples of some of his followers, that capture on the field ipso facto dissolved previous (heathen) marriages (see Koran iv 22); and that married wives (not merely virgins and slave-girls), even if their husbands were living and most likely present, might be passed to the immediate use of their conquerors, provided that certain precautions were taken against pregnancy. Are we to add these prescriptions to the universal “morals of war”?

But maybe Muhammad looked with disapproval at his soldiers but could not stop them? Maybe he himself never raped the captive women? Alas! The “Best of All Men” not only raped the captive women, but found a strange pleasure in raping those whose husband or father (or both) he had killed half an hour earlier. Juwayryia bint al Harith was the wife of Masafeah ibn Safuan, one of the leaders of the Banu Mustaliq tribe. He was killed during the attack of Muhammad in the skirmish by the Well of Marysi’. And Muhammad made her his wife immediately after the battle where her husband was killed.

After attacking the Banu Nadir Jewish tribe, Muhammad found a beautiful Jewish girl, Safiyya bint Huyayy. She was the wife of the treasurer of the tribe Kinana ibn al Rabi whom Muhammad had tortured and killed in order to make him reveal where the treasure of Banu Nadir was hidden. So Muhammad made her a widow. Her father, Huyayy ibn Akhtab, was also murdered by the order of Muhammad. Yet after this, “the Prophet of Islam” proposed marriage to the girl. The poor girl had “a choice”: either to become the wife of a man who killed her husband and father or to become a slave-girl, a toy for everybody her master tells her to please. She chose the lesser of the two evils and agreed.

Who would blame her? But another Jewish girl, a 17 year-old beauty named Rhianna of the Banu Quraiza tribe, refused to marry Muhammad who also killed her father and husband together with all the males of her tribe. And Muhammad raped her half an hour after ordering the murder of her family and then made her his slave-girl!

According to the Koran, Muslims have the right to sexually exploit all women – married, widowed, or unmarried – whom “their right hands possess.”

“And all married women (are forbidden unto you) SAVE THOSE (captives) WHOM YOUR RIGHT HANDS POSSESS. It is a decree of Allah for you…” (Koran, 4:24).

For any religious Muslim, anything Muhammad did and said is “The Truth Beyond Any Doubt.” If Muhammad did something – then any Muslim must simply do the same, and he will have the guarantee of Paradise.

However, Muslims did not stop there. They developed the teaching of the prophet and actually legitimized the rape of any woman who is “indecently dressed” or “demonstrates lewd behavior”.

What can you expect of a man raised in such traditions when he comes to the West?Saudi preacher gets fine and short jail term for raping and killing daughter

Public anger has gripped Saudi Arabia after a prominent preacher who raped and beat to death his 5-year-old daughter was sentenced to a few months in jail and a $50,000 fine – known as 'blood money' – to compensate the victim's relatives.

According to Islamic law, the 'blood money' can be paid in lieu of the death penalty. The preacher's fine was reportedly half the usual amount because the victim was a girl.

Saudi preacher Fayhan Ghamdi, a frequent guest on Muslim TV networks, confessed to using cables and a cane to inflict the injuries, AFP reported, quoting activists from the group ‘Women to Drive.’

Ghamdi reportedly doubted that his daughter, Lama Ghamdi, was a virgin, and forced her to undergo a medical inspection.

In December 2011, Lama was admitted to hospital with multiple injuries, including a crushed skull, broken ribs and left arm, and extensive bruising and burns, according to the activist group. Hospital worker Randa Kaleeb said that the girl's back was broken, and that she had been raped "everywhere."

The hospital told the victim's mother that her child's “rectum had been torn open and the abuser had attempted to burn it closed,” AFP reported on Saturday.

In October 2012, the girl died from her injuries. The following November, the father was arrested. The judge ruled that the "blood money and the time the defendant had served in prison since Lama's death suffices as punishment," activists reported.

The incident sparked public anger in Saudi Arabia, prompting an online Twitter campaign calling for more severe punishment for violence against women and children. The 'Women to Drive' campaign, launched by women's rights activist Manal Sharif, has demanded the creation of legislation that would criminalize violence against women and children.

The petition is circulating on Twitter under the hashtag 'Ana Lama' – "I am Lama" in Arabic.

The issue has gained widespread traction in Saudi Arabia, and authorities promised to set up a 24-hour hotline that will take calls regarding child abuse.

Thursday, August 15, 2013

Now that the Egyptian military has finally begun to neutralize Muslim Brotherhood terrorist bases, the so-called mainstream media are doing what they do best—twist reality to the Islamists’ benefit by casting them as innocent victims merely “holding vigil” only to be slaughtered, while calling for the prosecution of the military for “human rights abuses.” They essentially follow the pro-Brotherhood Al Jazeera’s lead of portraying these bases in Rab‘a al-Adawiya and elsewhere as peaceful “sit ins.”

The anecdotes are many. For instance, one man accused of stealing was tortured and had his finger chopped off (in accordance to Sharia). He appears in this video—his face beaten to a bloody pulp—describing his ordeal. Like so many in Rab‘a, he was there not as a Brotherhood supporter, but because he worked in the area. Accused of stealing, he insisted he was innocent. When his accusers refused to relent, he said, “Fine, if I’m a thief, hand me over to police,” but they said, “No, we will hand you over to Allah.” He was taken to a room and tortured for fourteen hours, including by being sprayed with water and repeatedly electrocuted and stabbed and sliced with a switchblade (in minute 3:47 he exposes his mutilated chest). Then, his “pious” tormentors supplicated their god by saying, “In the name of Allah,” before hacking his finger off.

Women are also easy prey in the Brotherhood camp. According to a recent report, they are being abused for refusing to have sex with Brotherhood supporters. One woman was reportedly tortured to death and another critically injured and hospitalized. An Egyptian organization concerned with female rights said it “will expose in the coming days the extent of the violations and crimes against humanity which our sisters have been exposed to by the orders of the General Guide [of the Brotherhood, Muhammad Badie] to coerce women to engage in sex-jihad, with torture to death for those who refuse.”

Here is another live interview with an Egyptian reporter who was kidnapped in Rab‘a, beaten, and told she must stay “because we need women for sex.” The logic behind the sex-jihad (or in Arabic jihad al-nikah) is that women are permitted to copulate with single, male Brotherhood protesters to help alleviate their sexual frustrations so they can focus on empowering Islam—which among the Brotherhood is synonymous with empowering the Brotherhood—without becoming too restless and possibly abandoning the jihad.

Then there are the corpses that are being found. According to journalist Ahmed Musa on Tahrir TV channel, one of the arrested terrorists confessed that Brotherhood leadership murdered more than 80 people who were either suspected of being police informants or were trying to escape the Brotherhood camps. The Brotherhood then buried the bodies in a mass grave inside Rab‘a. According to the arrested terrorist, the Brotherhood fears that, “if their camps are broken up, their crimes against humanity will be exposed and that the Ministry of Interior will take pictures of this mass grave and broadcast them to the world.”

Aside from these atrocities and accusations of atrocities, reports of general beatings were surfacing every day. The majority revolved around people working or living in Rab‘a, who were pressured to join the pro-Morsi protests, only to be beaten savagely for refusing.

Despite the many serious human rights abuses that took place under Brotherhood auspices, the only Western media ever to allude to any of this was an AP report that, after explaining how bound, dead bodies were found near Rab‘a and how many in Egypt insist it’s the work of the Brotherhood, immediately went into default mode by suggesting these could all be false allegations and, if dead bodies are being found, perhaps it’s the work of the military trying to frame the Brotherhood—exactly what the Brotherhood has been caught doing, killing their own supporters to frame the military.

Brotherhood exploitation of the media to garner sympathy is an old phenomenon. Years back, former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, discussing how Islamists often turn to violence when “dialogue” doesn’t go their way, said:

But when I see that you are firing at me, trying to kill me—well, I have to defend myself. Then the international news agencies go to these [Islamist] groups for information, and they tell them, “They are killing us, they are killing us!” Well, don’t you [news agencies] see them killing the police?! I swear to you, not one of the police wants to kill them—not one of us.

And now, as the Egyptian military disperses the Brotherhood’s terrorist camps, right on cue, the Western press is doing what it does best—skewing reality to the benefit of the Brotherhood.

Still, there is one positive side to all this. Because so many Muslim Brotherhood members and their Islamist allies had congregated in Rab‘a and elsewhere, turning them into mini Islamist states where Brotherhood rule was enforced—torturing, chopping fingers off, sexually abusing women, and murdering dissenters—we have gotten a glimpse of exactly what sort of state the Brotherhood sought to transform Egypt.

But just as it took several months before even Fox News told of the Muslim Brotherhood torture chambers—despite the fact that any number of Egyptian media had for months been disseminating pictures and videos of those tortured—no doubt it will take a while before news of the Brotherhood torture camps is ever disseminated in the West.

Update: Now that Egypt’s military has cleared out and is investigating Rab’a, buried bodies are indeed being found. So far, 28 bodies, most bearing marks of severe torture, including charring from electrocution, have been discovered — the handiwork of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Friday, August 9, 2013

The history of religion is probably parallel to the history of man; they came to existence together and may disappear together. As humans became more sophisticated, they became more aware of their lack of understanding of life and death. That lack of understanding provided fertile grounds that nurtured gossips and theories of all kinds. With continued human development, people thought of those questions concerning life and death and probably each person formulated his/her own theories and interpretations. Most people were honest enough to keep their own ideas to themselves without forcing it on others because they knew they made it up. Others were not that honest and proposed their own imagination as true answers for those questions surrounding life and the after life. That was the origin of religion and those dishonest people became the guardians of religions; clergymen, priests, ministers, sheikhs etc, you name it.

The above is my own imagination about the rise of religion, which I do not want to force on anyone. It is simplified and unlikely to be completely accurate, but it does indicate that religion was the product of two things that came together: ignorance and dishonesty. Religion was a product invented by the dishonest and sold to the ignorant.

There is nothing wrong in having no answers, but it is unacceptable to fake answers when there aren't any.

God

I do not intend to delve into the question of god’s existence because the issue doesn't bother me anymore. Nobody can be confident enough, or certain enough, to completely rule out the possibility of God’s existence. However, it is easy to rule out that God, if existed, needs to send prophets, write books or create confusing religions as Allah, the Islamic god, did.

‘Does it matter to Allah that humans follow a religion?’ The Islamic answer is “definitely Yes, they must follow Islam” which leads to the question: ‘If so, why didn't he create them to automatically follow Islam, by making a few changes to their DNA?’ From the Islamic point of view there is no point in creating all humans to be good and sin free, like prophets, because that will eliminate the need for Hell, the thrill of torture and the fun of the judgment day.

It would be more fun to make it like school education, where only those who work hard pass the test. In fact it is meant to be precisely like that, like school education, as the Quran states in numerous occasions (the emphasis is mine):

Q.3:142: “Do you think that you will enter the garden while Allah (the all knowing!) has not yet known those who strive hard from among you, and known the patient”.

Q.34: 21:".... that We (the all knowing!) may distinguish him who believes in the hereafter from him who is in doubt concerning it; ..."

Q.47: 31: And most certainly We (the all knowing!) will try you until We have known those among you who exert themselves hard, and the patient, and made your case manifest.

The above is the kind of information we are supposed to learn from the Quran: Allah, the all knowing, doesn't know! This is why it is recommended that you completely shut down your intelligence once you start reading the Quran, otherwise you cannot taste its perfection.

According to the Islamic logic: rather than creating good and sin free people, it is more fun to create a religion and then reward those who follow it and torture those who do not. For additional excitement, it is better to make it a confusing religion based on a confusing book that only the Arabs can read. This is just like making the exam questions tough and confusing (otherwise everybody can pass!).The climax of this fun was when Allah appointed Muhammad (believed to be illiterate) to be in charge of it all.

The above imagination fits only a god with seventh century knowledge and culture and who was raised in Arabia.

Islam - What is Islam about?

When Islam came to life fourteen centuries ago, the world was already full with religions. The persistent theme in the Quran is that the ancient people turned their backs to god, but the available evidence points to the contrary. Every tribe worshiped its god with obvious probity and sincerity. Everybody wanted to do his/her best to please god.

The Islamic god, Allah, was already known and worshipped in Arabia. Muhammad’s father name was Abdu-allah. Nearly all the Islamic rituals like pilgrimage, fasting, prayers and inheritance traditions were known and practiced by the Ahnaf and Sabean.

It appears that Muhammad didn't make any substantially new additions to what is already known in Arabia. However, by looking carefully we find that he did make one significant addition. It was an important addition that shaped Islam and made the bulk of it – he made it obligatory to believe in him as a prophet. Muhammad added his name to the religion to be second only to Allah’s name.

That is what Islam is about – glorifying Muhammad!

Islam starts with a big lie

Most Muslims are born to Muslim parents and had no choice but to become Muslims. The very effective indoctrination helps them not only to accept their fate but also to die for it. Increasingly there are more Muslims who convert to Islam from other religions. They usually come from troubled backgrounds with little or non existent religious roots, which explains why converts are usually Europeans or Americans. You don't see Arab Christian converts, despite the fact the Arab Christians are fluent in Arabic and have been in contact with Islam for longer time.

Muslims have the habit to pronounce the shahada several times a day. Those who convert to Islam must start by pronouncing the Shahada, which entitles them to acquire the title of Muslims. The Arabic word ‘shahada’ means ‘visualized or seen with the eyes’. The official Shahada statement is: “I see that there is no god but Allah and I see that Muhammad is the prophet of Allah”.

“I see?” This is as big as a lie can get!

No human can claim that he has seen (or researched and found, or proved etc.) god and that god was Allah. Also no human can claim to have seen Muhammad to be a prophet of that god. Big lie from the beginning to the end. The existence of god is debatable and is impossible to prove either way. Even if Muslims have proved the existence of god, with eye witness certainty, how can they rule out the existence of other gods? And how a Muslim can prove that ‘Allah’ is actually the name of that god? Stating that Muhammad was a prophet, is a bigger lie. Assuming he existed, which is also debatable, Muhammad is dead and the only way to say, with eye witness certainty, that he was seen to be a prophet is to lie.

Yet that is how people become Muslims! by signing a false statement!

The shahada is only the first lie in Islam, because everything that follows about that religion is based on lies-big lies.

From what has been explained so far, a decent person should reject Islam even if Muhammad or the Quran were perfect with no blemishes at all. But far from it.

Muhammad

None of the Islamic prophets was a good example to follow(1), but Muhammad was an extreme case. His life story is only written by Muslims yet it depicts an evil man, certainly not a prophet.

The following are only examples taken from sirat Ibn Hisham but they are also found in both Sahih books of Bukhari and Muslim:

* Muhammad, in many authentic hadiths, made it conditional that a true believer (in Allah) must love Allah him more than anything. The following Hadith is narrated by Bukhari: “I swear by He who created me, no one of you is a believer unless he loves me more than he loves himself, his wealth, his children and all mankind put together!”

What a humble personality! Why is it a requirement to love Muhammad (so much) in order to believe in Allah? And how is it possible to love somebody so much, especially that he may never have existed?

That Islamic requirement posed a real problem to me as a young Muslim. I was not convinced that I truly loved Muhammad more than my close relatives. In fact, Muhammad was automatically downgraded in my mind just because he demanded that love. But thanks to the Satan, I managed to live with so many secret sins because I blamed it all on him.Muhammad once urinated in a bowl in the night. Next morning, he realized that a lady, Umm Ayman, drank from that bowl thinking it was water, Muhammad smiled to her and assured her she will never suffer of stomach problems again, suggesting his urine was a blessing! In a similar incident narrated by Umm Umayma, an Abyssinian maid named Baraka drank the urine and Muhammad assured her that she will not go to hell(2)!

That was the conduct of the perfect man of Islam. That is what Muslims are supposed to emulate. Urinating in a bowl of water with no apology!

Muhammad’s sexual life was sickening and reflected a deranged personality. He used to make daily rounds on his wives to have sex with all of them, one by one, without washing in between. With Muhammad’s vast knowledge in medicine (3), how it escaped his mind that he could spread infection? No wonder that it is the religious people who tend to practice polygamy in Muslim countries.

Muhammad’s affair with Maria, the Coptic maid, suggests that he was both dishonest and unfaithful to Hafsa, his wife. He visited Hafsa and conspired to make her leave the house and used the opportunity to have sex with her maid. He was caught in action by his wife who returned home early. To calm her down, he promised not to do it. Even that promise was too much for Muhammad to keep. Soon, he used the Quran and released some verses to support his case to break that promise!

Muhammad’s marriage to Zainab was despicable and beyond contempt. He made her husband divorce her, breaking the poor man’s heart and ruining his emotional and family life, all to satisfy his sexual needs. Muhammad didn't mind to break the rules of adoption, which he banned, to pave the way to his marriage.

Muhammad’s marriage to Safyia was detestable and cruel. He raided the tribe of Bani Nadeer, in Khayber, early in the morning. He started by setting fire to their palm trees and finished by torturing Kenana, the chief of the tribe, and killing him. All men were killed and all women and children were enslaved. With blood all over the place he had the gut to take the beautiful widow of Kenana as a wife and had sex with her only hours after her entire tribe was massacred.

Muhammad’s marriage to Juwayreyia Bint Al Harith followed a similar scenario. He raided Bani Al Mustalak, killed their leader and married his wife only days after the death of her husband.

Any of the above stories is enough to make any person with respectable intelligence and morality conclude that Muhammad was an evil man; certainly not a prophet.

The Quran

The Quran is the back bone of Islam. It is claimed that it is the word of Allah, which reached us intact, unlike the Bible or the Torah. If the Quran falls, Islam falls immediately, which explains why Muslims are prepared to go to any length and do anything to preserve that imaginary picture of a perfect Quran.

To reduce criticism of the Quran, Muslims managed to dismiss all non Arabs as not qualified to debate the Quran on the basis that the Quran is written in a very sophisticated style that can be understood only by the highly qualified Arabs. Armed with such an excuse, the Muslims also managed to dismiss the majority of the Arabs as not qualified to debate the Quran.

In Muslim circles, the myth of Quranic miracles often comes up and they would talk about it for hours. However, when challenged they would shield themselves behind the excuse “I am not a scholar and not qualified to discuss the issue with you”.

There are no miracles in the Quran (4) and all the claims that have been made were proved to be lies. You would not expect miracles in a book full with mistakes of all kinds.

The so called miracles are mostly about claims that the Quran contains information that agrees with science. Of course, any book is supposed to agree with science. However, the Quran doe not agree with science at all. On the other hand, the finding of one error in the Quran is a proof that it is not divine and Muhammad was an impostor and Islam is a lie.

The reader is assured that the Quran contains hundreds of errors in its language (5), in its logic (6,7,8) and in its science (9,10). There are no Muslims who can explain any of the errors in the Quran. When challenged, their only strategy is to invent new meanings for the offending words!

I stopped looking at the claims of scientific and numerical miracles in the Quran; I think they have reached thousands by now. A researcher needs to live for centuries to research and disprove every one of those claims. I looked at some of them, the important ones, and they are all lies.

I am afraid the Quran is an insult to its author(s) and is a living proof that Muhammad was an impostor and Islam is a collection of lies.

Recently I posted a blog about the treatment of women in many Islamic states and the fact that such treatment, if following the legal definition, amounts to a crime against humanity. In it, I linked to a document produced by Amnesty International entitled "How to stone someone to death". The document describes in step-by-step detail, as outlined in the Iranian penal code, exactly how to bury someone up to their waist — or chest if female — and throw stones at their head until they die.

A few days after I had posted the blog, I re-read the document and felt it merited a blog of its own. Why? Because we need to admit, and face up to, the true horror of stoning. It is really happening. It is happening to real people and it is happening in the name of Islam. This is the truth — whether we like it or not.

Liars, apologists, the desperate to believe, and the interminably naive will deny it, or wish it not so, but no amount of wishing, denial, or apology erases objective fact, and these facts must be confronted.

If you don't have time, or can't stomach it, here are some of the main points of the document (though the pictures are worth looking at):

The size of the stone is specified (with accompanying pictures) so that it will not be too small, or too big. Suffering is important.

A man is buried to his waist and a woman to her chest. If he/she can get out of the hole, they can escape the punishment; so must make sure women cannot get out.

If the stoning is based on confession, the judge will throw the first stone. If based on witness testimony, the witness will throw the first stone.

Every 20 minutes or so, the stoning will stop to see if the condemned has yet died. If not, stoning continues (this is Article 23 by the way).

It is not all bad news though: Article 16 states that the punishment should not "inflict torture, torment or mutilation of the condemned" and the stoning will be carried out "with ultimate calmness and without exercising violence". I'm not sure what dictionary the Iranian regime reads but they've got a rather strange understanding of the words "torture" and "violence" - but then words mean whatever you want them to mean when you talk about Islam.

Earlier this year, Iran reviewed its penal code. Stoning as punishment for adultery was removed — that is until the Guardian Council got hold of it and promptly re-inserted this religious command. The Guardian Council is a group of unelected clerics who hold supreme power in Iran, and who ensure the compatibility of all legislation with sharia law.

Saudi Arabia also stones people to death, and the barbarism is swelling as sharia law advances. In the last few years, a 13 year old girl in Somalia, a soldier in Pakistan, and a young couple in Afghanistan have all been stoned to death. On all occasions, Islamic sharia law was cited as the justification. In fact, all of the countries which maintain stoning on their legal books are governed by sharia law.

Stoning is not mentioned in the Quran and because of this many people deny that it stems from Islamic teaching. This is dishonest at best. Stoning is not in the Quran but it is in the ahadith and for that reason, is part of sharia law. When Maryam Namazie and I debated a couple of Ahmadiyya Muslims at UCL in 2011, one of our opponents Ayyaz Mahmood insisted that stoning was not a part of Islam. His desperate to believe audience soaked it up, but the next day he was online admitting he had lied. The comments he made have since been removed, but Maryam has discussed them here.

This is what he said:

'Had Maryam asked me, "Has the Holy Prophet (sa) ever ordered that a man be stoned to death?" To this, I would have had to answer yes, and then hope and pray that the moderator would give me a minute or two (which isn't really enough) to explain the whole background of those specific Ahadith… But of course, at the time, the opportunity did not afford itself to give this entire explanation. So I gave her the direct answer to her question, which was a big, "NO". Only to silence her. Because I didn't want to get into this whole issue during the debate…'

So, let's clear this up — what is the basis for stoning in Islam?

Here is the hadith;

A bedouin came to Allah's Apostle and said, "O Allah's apostle! I ask you by Allah to judge My case according to Allah's Laws." His opponent, who was more learned than he, said, "Yes, judge between us according to Allah's Laws, and allow me to speak." Allah's Apostle said, "Speak." He (i .e. the bedouin or the other man) said, "My son was working as a laborer for this (man) and he committed illegal sexual intercourse with his wife. The people told me that it was obligatory that my son should be stoned to death, so in lieu of that I ransomed my son by paying one hundred sheep and a slave girl. Then I asked the religious scholars about it, and they informed me that my son must be lashed one hundred lashes, and be exiled for one year, and the wife of this (man) must be stoned to death." Allah's Apostle said, "By Him in Whose Hands my soul is, I will judge between you according to Allah's Laws. The slave-girl and the sheep are to be returned to you, your son is to receive a hundred lashes and be exiled for one year. You, Unais, go to the wife of this (man) and if she confesses her guilt, stone her to death." Unais went to that woman next morning and she confessed. Allah's Apostle ordered that she be stoned to death.

Sahih Bukhari 3:50:885

As a direct result of this story (and various translations but which always end the same way), stoning is a reality in Islamic states.

Lying is not the only defence against this barbarism though, apologists must also take credit. Their arguments include:

There must be four witnesses so really this is just a deterrent. Is this good enough? We don't object to a society where our sex lives are governed by the threat of a horrific punishment? Sorry, I don't want the threat of stoning any more than I want stoning, and to be fair, threatening to stone someone to death for having sex could hardly be described as moderate.

"But it's in the Bible as well". Yes it is in the Bible, but it's not being carried out in the name of the Bible (not any more at least). So the difference is between it happening and not happening. A rather significant difference you might say.

"This is the extreme fringe of Islam, it is a misinterpretation" – it seems that all Islamic states have misunderstood this, but so have many of Britain's mainstream and high-profile Islamists, including it seems, the moderate Muslim Council of Britain.

Inayat Bunglawala was a high-profile member of the MCB for many years. When he was the assistant secretary general, Bunglawala was asked by journalist Joan Smith to condemn stoning for adultery. Bunglawala refused to do so, adding "you are asking me to condemn my prophet". Bunglawala is not alone in the MCB in this regard. Suhaib Hasan has also misunderstood (Hasan is a prominent figure in the Islamic Sharia Council and blames women for the violence they face). He advocates stoning and once told us that "stoning will turn Britain in to a haven of peace".

The ultra-moderate Swiss academic and lecturer at Oxford University Tariq Ramadan has debated this issue in France with Nicolas Sarkozy. The ultra-moderate Ramadan not only told us that his view is a minority one, but that this view only stretches as far as asking for a "moratorium". In the debate Ramadan denied there was any violence against women in Islam, having just seconds earlier called for a "moratorium" on stoning for adultery. This is the 1984-esque double-speak we have come to expect (see point 5 above).

The fact is that stoning is very much a part of Islamic sharia law, and very much a reality in the lives of millions of people. Whether they face the stones, or face the threat of them, the real horror of this cannot be denied. Stoning needs to be named and shamed — there is too much at stake to run from this and bury our heads in the sand.

See also: 'The Stoning of Soraya M' is an important film and I highly recommend it. It displays the true terror of this crime in all its abominable glory. The Iranian Government called the movie "Islamophobic" which would be funny if not so deadly serious. The film is based on true events.